Last night SimCity Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis posted a statement on the EA forums addressing the ongoing issues with the game and players' complaints that servers are continually inaccessible. In his post Katsarelis says that the company is disheartened at the current state of the game's online servers - which players are required to be connected to in order to play even the single-player portion of the game - as well as the bugs players are encountering when they do get to play, and the long wait times to get into servers.

"This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues. "

Katsarelis adds the EA is adding additional servers over the next couple of days and that they are paying close attention to all the bugs that are being reported by players. He claims that the live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes are rolled out as quickly as possible.

"This team has put everything into this game and won’t stop until things are smooth," he concludes. "We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding. "

The post is followed with a thread of negative responses with fans who are justifiably livid at the situation.

EA is also keeping a thread open here to offer players up-to-the-minute progress reports on the work they are doing to get the game in stable working order..

But if you really want to know the current state of the game all you have to do is get on Twitter and read the tweets related to the #SimCity hashtag. Fans are not pleased, to say the least, and some have demanded refunds.